TV Tuner Cards
If you find yourself wishing you could watch television while you’re working on your notebook, or you just want to be able to consolidate your portable media devices and stop lugging around your portable television, you could purchase a TV tuner card for your laptop.

TV Tuner cards come in a variety of different makes and models. Some, such as the HP Express Card TV Tuner for Laptops, connect to a computer via the PCMCIA slot, while others, like the Hauppauge WinTV-USB2 External TV Tuner, have a plug which is inserted into a USB slot. And many laptops, such as the Toshiba Qosmio G25, have a TV tuner built right into the motherboard.

One thing that most of the TV runner cards share lately is the ability to plug them into cable or satellite programming via a coaxial cable connection. And any other external video source would work with this connection as well, such as camcorders, VCRs, DVD players, and video cameras.

But the really great thing about TV tuners for notebooks is not that you can watch TV on your laptop; it’s that your PC can act as a digital video recorder (DVR). With the right software, you can view, pause, and rewind live TV. Also, you can set the laptop up to record your favorite TV shows and then watch them later at your convenience. By searching for keywords in the show titles and descriptions, you can even record each episode of a series if you want. And if you have a DVD burner in your laptop, your computer can do one thing that most DVRs can’t do, which is save television programming to a DVD.

It’s also possible to videoconference over the internet with these devices, as many TV tuner cards are video digitizers, taking analog video signals from an external source such as a video camera, and sending them out over the internet digitally. Videoconferencing applications such as Microsoft NetMeeting, Windows Messenger, CU-See Me, and others, will work with the TV Tuner card to deliver smooth video to the person on the other end.

So if you’ve always wanted to watch TV on your laptop, or you want to use your PC as a digital video recorder or videoconferencing machine, TV tuner cards are just the ticket.